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Decreasing prices are good for the consumer, but I'm not a fan of the downside: ever-compressing product lifecycles and pressure on prices means we're beginning to drown in a tide of cheap, near-identical and - increasingly often - low-quality products. There's now a collective groan as a new day dawns

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and another hastily produced Windows Mobile-based smartphone rolls into the office, with nothing to recommend it except the knowledge that we won't have to put up with it for long: it'll be superseded by a new one in about two weeks.

Lamenting the old times is always a pointless pursuit, but there's something to be said for the days when new products came along every year or two and we actually looked forward to them, as opposed to falling over piles of them every morning on the way to the coffee machine. In light of everyone wanting greener computing, the senselessness of products with such short lifetimes looks even sillier; efforts to reduce your consumption of fossil fuels are pointless if you're replacing your mobile phone every two months and tossing the old one in a landfill. The time has come to start thinking a bit harder about whether we really need another new gadget.